Authors: Karen (Sikes) and Michael B. Collins
Slowly driving by this place in December, 1988, we could see logs in a tiny cottage in front of a pink asbestos-sided large house. In the dirt we could see square nails and pieces of glass with heavy patina.
From 49th Street the roofline of the main house was typical of early pioneer homes and the house’s thick walls were obvious from the deep inset of the doors.
Later that day with the realtor, we found in the attic cedar rafters held together at the ridge with wood pegs.
Cedar braces were attached to the rafters with wood pegs.
Removing several layers of siding at a corner we saw big cedar logs put together with dovetail notches—the best log construction technique. Yes, we knew what was here on that first day.
After buying the two lots and three buildings, our first steps included building a high chain link fence and renting a 40 cubic yard commercial rolloff dumpster.
In the first few weeks we filled the dumpster a dozen times with trash.
On the advice of our historic architect, we removed all additions made to the main house in the 1950s and 1960s salvaging reusable things (doors, diamond-paned windows, tubs and toilets).
We then began carefully removing boards which enclosed the log walls. With clues from writing on both wood and stone, we were able to date the enclosure of the log walls and more. The Colorado Lumber Company which supplied these boards was in business 1905-1911.
Two workmen signed the wall and back side of a board, and the city directories indicated they could have worked together only in 1910. Now we knew when the log walls were enclosed.
S W French Lumber Company stamp dated the ceiling in the dogrun to the 1880s.
The inscription and date 1899 chiseled into a stone used as a pier for a flue helped us date when the two chimneys disappeared.
A large room had been added to the main log house which we could date to 1910 because of the Colorado Lumber Company boards. We decided to carefully remove this room and use the lumber for a less obtrusive addition.
The Colorado Lumber Company boards were exceptionally fine pine shiplap. There were enough boards for all the new walls. Thousands of tack holes and streaks of paint on many pine boards are evidence of a previous life when they hid the log walls.
Finally we were back to just the original double pen dogrun log house.
But when we began removing the 1950s additions around the rock ruin on the corner, we got a SHOCK. We found a court case in which the owner of our place in 1952 was accused of stealing a vacant rent house, hauling it here and attaching it to the rock ruins.
He was sued, lost, and title of this place passed to Calcasieu Lumber Company which had liens to cover the cost of renovations being made to the property.
That owner, a U.T. architecture professor, collected interesting architectural parts of old houses being torn down in Austin and used some of them in the remodeling of this place. So the things we resalvaged, even though old, were not originally part of the early history of this place. But what an unusual new chapter they now added to Moore-Hancock!
A stained glass door and small diamond-paned windows came from turn-of-the century houses built elsewhere in Austin and now gone. Most of the small windows were originally transoms.
Clawfoot tubs and hanging tank toilets dated to the 1920s but we knew from interviews with neighbors that there was no indoor toilet here until the 1940s. So those also likely arrived here in 1952.
After we removed windows, doors, tub, toilet, and other material worth saving, we demolished the deteriorated seven-room “stolen” house which we learned had been moved once before and had been left vacant because of its bad condition.
So now we were back to what was left of the original rock building with a root cellar and an open well hole.
The tiny log cottage was originally a small barn built with poorly secured corners. Neighbors told us the original solid log walls were cut for two doors, two windows and a fireplace in 1952 by a contractor with Calcasieu Lumber Company. We did not try to restore to the barn appearance because we would have lost some original logs.
But the building had serious problems. To rebuild the deteriorated rock foundation of the barn, we bolted sheets of plywood on the corners. Then attached 2 x 12s horizontally with the ends protruding. Four jacks under the ends allowed us to raise the entire log barn up a few inches so we could restore the rock foundation.
We pegged two new cedar beams into the top of the walls to keep them from splaying out further (circled in red). And we added two heavy metal beams to supplement the spindly rafters holding up the roof (lined in yellow).
The Travis County Archeological Society members were super heroes to us. They volunteered on weekends for 2 years. They excavated by gridded 3’ squares where we needed to answer questions, sometimes under difficult conditions like in the dogrun.
They screened dirt. They washed, labeled, and catalogued artifacts. We fed them home-cooked meals every day they worked.
One of the squares they excavated near the summer kitchen door was full of kitchen trash which was deposited on chips of stone left from shaping the rocks. That told us that the rock building was built at the same time as the log house before any trash could accumulate. The artifacts we found told us a lot about the people who lived here so many years ago.
Another area excavated under the porch turned up artifacts from indigenous peoples who camped here 3500 years ago.
We were offered another source of volunteers by the county attorney who wanted to find a way for a fraternity to work off community service hours. Since we were zoned historic, we qualified.
For 10 months groups of young college men helped remove additions.
They pulled tacks and nails, loaded and unloaded trailers, stacked every rock and brick even if broken.
They helped archeologists screen dirt.
The Delts had a major role in the demolition of an addition to the old house. Their help put us at least 6 months ahead of schedule.
After the Travis County archeologists excavated around the rock ruins to find foundations and footings, we knew how to rebuild the missing half of the rock summer kitchen and the shed. We hired a master rock mason to rebuild the rock summer kitchen and the rim around the well as well as to rebuild the two chimneys missing from the log house.
We hired a master carpenter to build the addition behind the main house for a kitchen and bathroom. The passive addition was not attached to the log house-it butted up against it so that no irreversible damage was done by connecting the two.
He also worked with us to build the rock summer kitchen roof and shed using mortise and tenon and peg techniques on logs we prepared.
We did all the restoration work on the log buildings ourselves starting with the harvest of cedar trees.
We learned to adze logs for missing porch posts, and we drilled holes and whittled pegs for all the support beams and rafters in the rock summer kitchen.
Our historic architect analyzed some original chinking and gave us a formula (mix lime and water to putty consistency, then 6 parts putty, 18 parts sand and 2 parts screened dirt) which we followed to completely rechink the barn and both ends of the log house.
No original logs were replaced but we patched several deteriorated logs on the north end of the house and filled in several places where portions of logs had been earlier cut out.
We found salvaged 1890s pine beams which we had milled into 1 1/8 inch thick tongue and groove for floors in the dogrun and addition. For the missing baseboards and door facings, we milled pine boards a full inch thick.
In addition to taking hundreds of photographs of the restoration process, we kept a typed daily log.
Restoration of this historic place involved more than our physical labor. In 1987 the City of Austin had condemned this place. Immediately after we purchased the property, we met with the city officials to tell them our plan to restore the buildings and to stop foreclosure proceedings.
A few months into the project we invited members of the city council, planning commission, board of adjustments, and landmark commission to come see the place and hear our plans.
We received historic zoning and city landmark status and were given a metal marker.
We wrote a footnoted history for the Texas Historical Commission which deemed us worthy of state landmark status. The same information put us on the National Register of Historic Places. These designations offered a little protection and some tax advantages.
Another kind of labor was needed from the beginning. In 1988 nobody knew when this log house was built or by whom. Going back in time from our deed, we compiled a list of owners. We knew the owners up to 1842 had not built this house. From tax rolls we pinpointed a year 1849 when major improvements were made under the ownership of Elizabeth and Martin Moore.
And shortly thereafter the local newspaper advertised the Moore’s previous home in town for sale or rent. From these facts and other data, we knew then that our home was built in 1849 by the Moore family on land inherited by Elizabeth Moore.
We traced the genealogy of past owners and tenants down to living descendants hoping to find photos of the house. We didn’t find any photos but we helped reconnect many Central Texans to some lost family history including descendants of gunfighter Ben Thompson who married Kate Moore, the daughter of the original builders.
This restoration proved that ordinary people can restore and protect our historic places.
The Moore-Hancock Farmstead, Austin’s last log house on its original site, has a future.
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